Started off with 13 hours in A & E at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, suspected heart condition. They dischared me at 1am Tuesday morning with no way to get home (19 miles) so I found a late night eatery and got a kebab, then ate it in the university library (open 24/7). Spent the rest of the night on a computer doing what I had planned on doing 12 hours earlier.

Spent much of the rest of the week ferrying my 9 month's pregnant grandaughter to and from the maternity hospital for various appointments/false alarms.

__________________"Truth is stranger than fiction: fiction has to make sense." Leo Rosten.

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." C. S. Lewis

"I find television very educational. Whenever somebody switches it on I go in the other room and read a book." (attributed to Groucho Marx)

Kibby has been in Staunton Va for the last almost 2 weeks. She has 2 LARPers arguing over who gets her to live with. The plan is to switch place every week. Someone is taking her job hunting. She's coming home for about a week, then moving up there.

I am happy for her, and have told her so, but sad at the same time, wich I have not told her.

__________________MEDDLE NOT IN THE AFAIRS OF DRAGONS, FOR YOU ARE CRUNCHY & GOOD WITH CHOCOLATE

Yeah, I knew that, And while looking for Poop all day may Stink, ( pun intended ) Watching the Stinky Crap on TV Stinks worse. At least being outside and helping to keep track of a perhaps, endangered species by searching for what it left behind, is helpful. And P'ter as for not owning a Tele, Good for you, Makes for nice quiet reading!

__________________
"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven"

I'm with P'ter - I'd rather spend the day on the canal bank. Though I'd probably get distracted from the task of the day by looking at all the plants and trying to see how many of them I was familiar with from here.

I spent the afternoon at Weta Studios Park Street Post Production, looking at how they make prosthetics, models and suchlike - got to handle real chain-mail (VERY heavy) and a dwarven sword (a metre long but light because it's made of aluminium) Cameras are a no-no unfortunately - our guide spent some time explaining to us that the artefacts that we were looking at still belong to the people who commissioned them and we really do not want to take on Warner Brothers on copyright issues.

It was quite an object-lesson in why there isn't a Pern movie too - It would have to be a block-buster to justify the cost of making the dragons - and you can't recycle them from one film to another because of copyright reasons. So the same studio made Avatar and The Hobbit, but the whole process has to start off at the beginning with 500 or more drawings, different sizes of models and parts of models, animatronics, then Weta Digital gets involved, then there the actors, even for what's going to be an animated movie like Tintin. Weta Digital invented the programs that made an actor into Gollum and 150 actors into entire armies and they're used all over the world now.

I asked about training, and they prefer to do their own. They look for creativity, commitment, the ability to think outside the box, to work in a team and to work under pressure rather than fancy qualifications. It might be different in Weta Digital, our guide was a model-maker.

That must have been a great visit, Vyon. I've seen several good documentairies on Weta and what is involved in making a movie but to visit and handle things, even without being allowed to make pictures, must have been amazing.

__________________Hans, also known as Elrhan, Master Archivist

Visit The Pern Museum & Archives for all your Pern and Anne McCaffrey News and Resources!
The Pern Museum & Archives is the home of the Pern Encyclopedia and the Pern Bloodlines.

Touring a Studio would be fantastic! The things they can do today are great. The special effects in movies today really bring the fantasy to life. I hope i can get a chance one day. Lucky you, Vyon! Still hoping for a PERN Movie in my lifetime!

__________________
"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven"

It's the live aspect of the tour that makes it so fantastic I think. Our guide was one of the model makers and he told us what it was like working with the different people and how some of the costumes were made. For the Scale of Our War - WW1 exhibition at our National Museum, the figures are 2.8 times human size, so they had to find a sewing machine and thread that was 2.8 times normal size to make their clothes. https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=th...w=1346&bih=607 The people depicted in this exhibition have warts, moles and individually planted arm-hair, all 2.8 times human size. Photographs are allowed there, but difficult to take because of the way the exhibition is set up and lighted. Part of the ethics of the Weta group of companies is for it to stay in Wellington and so the city is bristling with Weta projects.
Having done the Park Road tour I now want to do the Weta Cave tour, but it's more expensive.

The house of the owner is being renovated. The MoM server resides there so we could experience difficulties now and then as maybe power goes off and other things. We'll just have to bear with it and it will soon be over.

__________________Hans, also known as Elrhan, Master Archivist

Visit The Pern Museum & Archives for all your Pern and Anne McCaffrey News and Resources!
The Pern Museum & Archives is the home of the Pern Encyclopedia and the Pern Bloodlines.

Holy smokes its been a while since I was on here...Just randomly picked up the Dragon books again after a long hiatus from reading much of interest (or anything at all to be fair!...Excess of real life has kept preventing me from being able to make time!). Had utterly forgotten how easily they can utterly suck you in.

Wound up going through the entirety of Dragondrums in one and a bit evenings, and now about a third of the way through The White Dragon.

Only picked that one up at random because it's the first I ever read many years ago. Despite being in the middle of the series and at the end of a specific sequence of books with essentially its own plot arc, Anne didn't half do a good job of writing in such a way that you could just jump in face-first and learn the world as you went.

So many other stories I've read which are series of x number of books, if you jump in anywhere other than the start you'd be utterly lost or at least feel like you were missing out on some of the story.

Going to have to kick myself a bit this evening to actually put the book down a sensible hour, not staying up till 4AM reading again...

I spend half the time in denial about being 26 (LOOOOL) this year, so I can only imagine how you're feeling. I hope she's enjoying it and doing well for herself!

__________________Paired with Calenlily. Woo, I has a stalker! *heart*

Those who seek to create war are mongrels and fools, but the blood they spill as a result is never meaningless. - Lucrezia Noin

When someone is grieving for what they've lost, you can't really say you know how they feel, or how they should handle things. Because even if you've lost too, everyone grieves differently. Anyone who says otherwise are presumptuous idiots.-Hayley (My friend can be an astonishing wealth of wisdom)

I'd absolutely swear blind that I'd replied to this post...However neither the website nor the computer agree with me, so I have to guess I dreamt it. Sounds about right for me these days. Either that I I started composing a response on the laptop then gave up on account of it having taken to randomly dropping keyboard inputs these days. A habit which rapidly becomes infuriating as a reasonably rapid touch typist and soon results in me wanting to hurl the thing through the nearest window. In fairness to it, it's rapidly heading towards ten years old, so by the standards of computers these days hasn't had a bad run.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hans

Welcome back!

You were the one with the full body fur cosplay stuff and such, weren't you? I made some pics of fantastic costumes you'd love at last year's Elf Fantasy Fair.

Yep, that's me. Currently have my own main costume probably 60% done (after it having to take something of a back seat due to other real life concerns getting in the way for a while), and have managed to drag another two members of the household into the madness with me as well. They've currently got their own characters in the process of being brought to life, albeit having opted to commission someone to do the work for them. In hindsight, that would have been the sensible option for me...but when did I ever do anything the sensible way?

Had a few setbacks along the way too, which isn't really surprising. Most troublesome probably was discovering that ears are quite difficult. There's a careful balance that needs to be struck between being too big, bulky and heavy, and actually having enough structural integrity. Sadly I discovered that I'd not managed to get this balance right *after* they were attached to the head and sewed into the hood. So quite a bit of unpicking stitching has been involved in sorting that out. The tail has presented problems as well, though that's probably more down to my tendency to over-engineer things than actually a problem with the overall design. It's just turned out quite a bit heavier than I'd originally planned...A double-edged sword there in that it means that the movement will look so much better, but it does mean I need to figure out the attachment method a bit better, a couple of belt-loops aren't going to cut it.

Still have designs on putting together as realistic as possible a dragonrider's outfit as well - that being something that would fit in well at the sort of events I go to, without being quite such a commitment in terms of limiting my ability to function on my own without a handler tagging along to make sure I don't do something daft like wander into a main road or get swatted in the face by overly aggressive spring loaded doors.

...I'm quite capable of doing that on my own *without* severely limited vision.

Dragonrider's costume is relatively easy compared with that. A rather scratched-up lambskin bomber jacket - achieved by accidentally shutting the cat in the wardrobe it was hanging in - a pair of brown trousers, and a fire-lizard - OK, I did make the fire-lizard myself. And my computer's dropping letters too - most notably the z - why that (oh, and the question mark) I'd expect it to be something much more used like a vowel or the S or T.

For some reason I can't edit the post above, my computer is refusing to re-load it. I was going to add that you won't easily find the hat I'm wearing in my avatar. It is very heavy felt, brown on the outside and creamy-white on the inside. I stole it off one of my sons who bought it at a market in Budapest. We suspect it got there via the Silk Road from Mongolia. He never saw that market stall again.
I wore the outfit to an Armageddon show. No-one recognised it as a Pern costume. Here they seem to be all into Marvel and Magna characters. I had a similar problem last year when I went as a character from the Fantastic Beasts film. At least somebody thought I was Miss McGonagal!

For keyboards that are becoming cantankerous: If you have access to an air compressor, use a "blowgun" nozzle to blow dust and dirt out of your keyboard. Vacuums will help, but they can't draw hard enough to get the real accumulation knocked loose. The z and ? are in the bottom corners where dust will migrate to and accumulate the most. If you like a real challenge, remove the keys before you start cleaning. It's always fun trying to get them back where they belong. You may find you don't know your keyboard layout as well as you thought.

Just shut the electronics down before using air pressure, in case there may be any moisture in the line, as well as accidental generation of static electricity. Attack slowly; do not use full pressure at super close range. Vacuum after blowing.

They used to sell cans of "dry" compressed air for this task, but I haven't seen such for quite a while.

__________________All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Some nice examples there, the second one I'm pretty sure I've seen somewhere before. Style is quite reminiscent of the sort of thing I'm aiming for with mine, sort of realistic but not going too far (which can wind up slightly creepy if you don't get it perfect!). The rest of the household are going for a more cartoony look, which fits well with their characters. Not sure I could pull that off so well... I'm.better at stealthily slinking around than poinging around like Tigger.

Pretty sure my computer issue isn't a physical problem with the keyboard, rather a software glitch with the actual scanning of the input. It just seems to glitch for a fraction of a second periodically, and any keystroke involved gets dropped. I might throw a fresh copy of Debian on it when we're back from holiday...though it's an intermittent fault, so tracking it is always a challenge...

Some nice examples there, the second one I'm pretty sure I've seen somewhere before. Style is quite reminiscent of the sort of thing I'm aiming for with mine, sort of realistic but not going too far (which can wind up slightly creepy if you don't get it perfect!). The rest of the household are going for a more cartoony look, which fits well with their characters. Not sure I could pull that off so well... I'm.better at stealthily slinking around than poinging around like Tigger.

She's a Ming Chun Dragon and calls herself Belora Dan Winters
I think she appears (appeared) on several European conventions and fairs.

For keyboards that are becoming cantankerous: If you have access to an air compressor, use a "blowgun" nozzle to blow dust and dirt out of your keyboard. Vacuums will help, but they can't draw hard enough to get the real accumulation knocked loose. The z and ? are in the bottom corners where dust will migrate to and accumulate the most. If you like a real challenge, remove the keys before you start cleaning. It's always fun trying to get them back where they belong. You may find you don't know your keyboard layout as well as you thought.

Just shut the electronics down before using air pressure, in case there may be any moisture in the line, as well as accidental generation of static electricity. Attack slowly; do not use full pressure at super close range. Vacuum after blowing.

They used to sell cans of "dry" compressed air for this task, but I haven't seen such for quite a while.

Thanks for the logical explanation, Allen. The problem is now fixed. I didn't have access to a compressor, but thought of a camera lens cleaner that I owned years ago which consisted of a very soft brush attached to a rubber puffer and decided to see if the local camera shop had one. It didn't, but a nearby computer and white ware shop had something very similar which had the puffer and brush separately and that worked just fine. I didn't even have to risk pulling the keys off to get under them. A bonus was a gold card (pensioner) discount of $6.51 on something that only cost $20.00 in the first place! so zzz & ??? work just fine.

Computer shop A which told me I needed a new computer and computer shop B which tried to sell me a keyboard will not see me again.